spotlight

GoPro, Young Man

In October 2012, when the Austrian stuntman Felix Baumgartner jumped from a balloon at nearly 128,000 feet and exceeded the speed of sound during a free fall, five little GoPro cameras were strapped to his suit to record high-definition views of his heroics. At around the same time, GoPro became the best-selling video camera in the United States, and its inventor and chief promoter, a Northern California surfer named Nicholas Woodman, became a billionaire. Woodman is now 39 but seems younger. His success is due in part to his authenticity—he is a genuine member of the extreme-sports crowd, given to whooping and exclaiming “Awesome!” without irony. But he is also an unusually focused businessman. Woodman started with the idea of inventing a wrist strap to which surfers could attach a camera to show themselves in action. He soon realized that, for lack of suitable devices in the marketplace, he had to invent the camera too—something inexpensive, waterproof, mountable every which way, and providing an ultra-wide-angle view. In a world awash in polished videos of professional surfers, he sympathized with the urge that ordinary surfers have to look like that, too. He called the camera the Hero, and began to sell it to surf shops in 2004. It took off right away, with sales that grew from about 1,500 units the first year to at least three million annually today. So it wasn’t just the surfing culture that he tapped into. It turned out that all sorts of people doing all sorts of things wanted to mount a camera to film themselves and their activities. The camera also caught on with scientists, soldiers, athletic coaches, journalists, surgeons, and probably jihadists too. But it’s the amateurs who count the most. Their output is astonishing—a video time capsule of our era. Woodman thought he’d be selling mainly to fellow surfers, but as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have shown, the interest of people in themselves is boundless. Woodman’s market niche turned out to be humanity. Now his company is going public. No wonder he says he’s stoked.